Why not use system time?
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Hi,
I was just wondering why Flux can't just use the system time instead of having it's own manual location selection service. System time on Mac has a built in location service support. If you used system time, the profile could adapt seamlessly. Instead, I now have to manually switch locations every time when I travel. The location switcher is also pretty buggy.
Wouldn't it be much easier to just check what it is in the system and then adjust the cycles based on that?
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The first problem is that sunrise/sunset can vary by several hours from the local timezone - e.g., when traveling to Australia, or even China (which has one timezone for the whole country). We tried to make this automatic in our first version in 2009 and gave it up, because people wanted it to be much closer to actual sunrise/sunset. (The system time widget does not tell us the location of the machine, but only the timezone offset, so macOS/Apple know this but we don't get it automatically.)
f.lux tries to know your location within about 5 miles (rather than exactly for privacy reasons), and it does prompt when your timezone changes - we could work on making it more seamless, but there are privacy implications with making it too quiet.
